The Art and Science of Making a Believable Sci-Fi Spaceship

Humans have yet to travel beyond our own star, or even beyond our planet's moon, but science fiction–books, movies, TV–has given us countless visions of what it might be like when we do, with varying degrees of respect for scientific accuracy. From the centrifugal gravity of 2001's Space Station V to the handwave-y hyperspace capabilities of the Millennium Falcon, there is a delicate balance between possible and awesome, likely and ludicrous. The ships of the video game franchise Mass Effect are no different, except for the subtle but serious constraints of the digital world, which are very much real.

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Here's the pitch: The year is 2785 and humanity has just finished its first successful journey to a galaxy beyond the Milky Way. On a mammoth spaceship called the Ark Hyperion, 20,000 adventurous souls awake to their new home 2.5 million lightyears away after 600 years in cryosleep. Three similar ships, each one loaded with individuals of other alien races, have made the journey as well, and the quartet emerges from hyperspace to find a half-built and gargantuan space station, under construction with local resources. This is the base from which they'll strike out to find their new home.

"Mass Effect has always been grounded by a basis in reality."

This is Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth game in the widely loved space opera series, and the first to take place after the conclusion of its first trilogy, beloved by gamers and sci-fi fans alike. Certain details of game developer Bioware's new space opera immediately stick out as fiction—like the aliens and interstellar faster-than-light travel—but it also has plenty in common with the harsh realities of space travel. A one-way trip to a distant world, and infrastructure built in advance by the earliest pioneers, are only some of the details Project Andromeda shares with Elon Musk's prospective plans to colonize Mars.

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And that's not a coincidence. It's an outgrowth of the desire to make a space epic with sci-fi elements based in scientific truth. "Mass Effect has always been grounded by a basis in reality," says the Mass Effect: Andromeda Creative Director Mac Walters, and nothing in Andromeda exemplifies this more than its spaceship design.

Take the Nexus, for example, a kilometers-long space station engineered to serve as civilization's base of operation among the unexplored planets. In the game's lore, the monstrous ship's kilometers-long design is inspired by "the Citadel," and ancient alien relic of mysterious origin around which the series' initial trilogy pivots. But despite its extraordinary inspiration, the ship itself has some surprisingly practical details. Designed to travel half-built, the Nexus is constructed over the course of the game, during which its carefully designed and realistic framework is exposed.

The Nexus, in blueprint form.

Electronic Arts

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These details are hardly arbitrary. The Nexus was designed and redesigned a whole mess of times during the game's development. "There were probably 20 versions of it," Walters says. And that's just the process of dreaming up the final design. Building it inside the games engine required even more nuts and bolts construction. According to Walters, designing the game's spaceships took the lion's share of the character modeling time. Not that it would necessarily have to. "We could have made this so it was just 'Look! It's a giant silver orb' but then the explanation isn't realistic—it's just 'space magic'.

There's plenty of space magic woven into the Mass Effect fabric, defying pesky things like the known laws of physics

The Mass Effect universe already has plenty of space magic woven into its fabric, for the express purpose of defying pesky things like the known laws of physics. The titular "mass effect" is the foundational one. A technique involving electricity, dark matter, and the non-existent "element zero," the mass effect allows for the manipulation of physical mass in certain—let's face it—"space magic" fields. This fictional effect can reduce hulking spaceships to negative mass assuming there's a sufficient supply of power, which is what enables faster-than-light travel. Essentially, it frees ships in the Mass Effect universe from the main constraint space vehicles face here in the actual universe: considerable mass and the finite speed of light. Floating orb-ships might break the suspension of disbelief, but the space magic is already there. It's just a judgement call of how far to push it.

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However, that doesn't mean these sci-fi ships are completely devoid of constraints. They just have to adhere to different physics, the physics that govern microchips and memory. To see it in action, look no further then the Tempest, the scientific scout ship the player and crew call home. The ship has an interior that flows from room to room with no obstructions, a departure from similar ships in previous games which had decks separated by an elevator designed to help disguise load times. It's been a common strategy in previous games, to the extent that Mass Effect's long elevator rides—and the perplexing lack of in-universe technology that could speed them up—became something of a running joke.

The Tempest meeting room, which overlooks the ship's main lobby.

Electronic Arts

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But in the Tempest? Not an elevator in sight. In fact, there aren't even any doors separating the main rooms areas of the ship. "It's all continuous," Walters notes as a point of pride. The layout of this continuous space might seem arbitrary to the untrained eye, but it's actually carefully planned to fit inside a computer or game console's rigid restrictions.

"It's not just the aesthetics," Walters says "There are characters in all these rooms, and they can all have conversations. They can move around. We have to be able to stream that in at any given point." Lines of sight and room-to-room flow are designed to slow a potential tsunami of data into a controllable stream of bits and bytes. "It'd be great if we could say 'Just load it all into memory!' but that will never happen."

"It'd be great if we could say 'Just load it all into memory!' but that will never happen."

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Despite the challenges, the inside of the Tempest is detailed and believable. None of the concerns of the digital world infringe on ship's otherwise realistic form. The little things line up. The Nomad—a rugged six-wheeled truck the Tempest holds in its cargo bay—will in fact fit down the ramp that lowers beneath it. And if you peek inside the door, you'll find the seats fit for crew members as well. Practically these details don't need to exist. The Tempest could fly without and engine room, and the Nomad could roll without a drivers seat or even without wheels. But they are crucially important to constructing a believable world. Building a spaceship in the digital world might not be quite as hard as it is here in reality, but that doesn't mean freedom from constraints—it just means different ones.

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